Women

Saturday

Ruaridh Nicoll

Cuba is a lovesick country

When I first moved to Cuba, an ex-girlfriend said: “That sounds lovely, Ruaridh. What next, Thailand?” The Caribbean island has always come with a certain reputation – the writer A.A. Gill noted that the Cubans are the “most libidinously choreographed people in the world.” It wasn’t the revolution that made Cuba known for sex. The sleaze goes way back, probably to 1492 and beyond (naughty Tainos), but by the 1950s, Havana’s infamous Shanghai Theater was putting on live sex shows, performed by a gentleman called “Superman” – and not because he could fly. Such libertine ways – and the mob that controlled then – were part of the reason Fidel Castro gave for tumbling the then dictatorship.

Friday

The Spectator

Who’s the most underrated American?

Bill Kauffman Luther Martin: a voluble and drunken Maryland attorney who walked out of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 after warning his fellow delegates that their handiwork provided the framework for a centralized and militaristic empire that would efface regional distinctions and erode the liberties for which American patriots had fought and bled a decade earlier. An unheeded prophet who breathed the Spirit of ’76. Lionel Shriver Edith Wharton. Hardly unrecognized, but under-taught and too little familiar to the international literary readership (e.g., in Britain). A spectacular stylist, she wrote novels that still sound modern and perfectly accessible 100 years later – and she was a real feminist before the days the word meant humorless pill.

American

Friday

Peter Jones

Did Plato invent women’s lib?

One could go on endlessly about what the ancients have done for us, but one of the most interesting things is that Plato could be said to have invented women’s lib, though it seems to have taken 2,500 years to catch on. Since most ancient states were at war much of the time, putting the male population especially at risk, women had to commit to the production line as soon as possible if the state were to survive. But Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue The Republic, portrays a utopia in which women shared the same status as men. The ruling class of this state are called Guardians and Plato likens them to dogs hunting and protecting the flock, an activity in which female dogs engage just as much as male dogs (though the males are stronger).

plato

Wednesday

Zoe Strimpel

Is perimenopause a myth?

From our UK edition

I was born in London in 1982 and my parents were neither hippies nor part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. As a result, frank talk about body parts, functions and sexual development was generally non-existent. The arrival of my period was not something I remember having any feelings about whatsoever, and it certainly wasn’t something the womenfolk in my family celebrated. Hormones were rarely invoked in the culture more widely apart from in a general 'raging' way to explain the wildness of teens. Flash forward 40 years and the cultural tides have turned in quite a startling way. Now it often feels like women talk about nothing but their periods, or the dwindling thereof.

Wednesday

Julia Hamilton

A Boomer’s guide to ‘grannycore’

From our UK edition

‘Grannycore’, the latest TikTok trend beloved of Gen Z, seems to be about a nostalgic aesthetic centred on the comforting style and hobbies of a ‘traditional’ grandmother. In real life, however, things could hardly be more different for us Boomer grannies.  Yes, we cook and possibly do needlework if we feel like it. We might even knit. But if you’re expecting a storybook grandmother – a stooped, doughy figure with a wispy white bun held in place by kirby grips, clad in a twinset and pearls and wearing sensible shoes – then you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree. As a Boomer granny born in 1956, my early life was profoundly influenced by the 1960s – when sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll first appeared on the scene.

Friday

Christa D’Souza

The politics of long hair

What is the literal cut-off point for women having very long hair (and by “long” I mean where it almost goes into the toilet bowl)? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Try 65 – the age I turned this year. If this strikes you as grossly inappropriate, in theory I’m with you. The unspoken rule is that the older you get, the shorter your hair should be. Nobody within ten or even 20 years of me has hair as long as mine. What can I say? As with wearing inappropriately colored nail polish, it is just another small act of defiance women d’un certain age can employ to remind this cruel world that we do actually still exist. My hair has been this length for so long it has become a part of my identity: how I see myself in the universe. I am my hair and thus find it hard to imagine life without it.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Why I can’t resist a red-light district

I am writing this on the 17th floor of the Novotel Sukhumvit, on Soi 4, aka “Soi Nana,” in Khlong Toei, Bangkok. For anyone that knows the Big Mango, they’ve already guessed where I am, psychogeographically: from that tell-tale word “Nana.” For those still in the dark, I am on the rude, ribald, rambunctious street that is Soi 4, which is full of tattoo parlors, 7-Elevens, dried-squid-sellers, fake Italian winebars, blaring “British” pubs, slightly dodgy pharmacists, hair salons that do laundry as well – it culminates in Nana Plaza, a multitiered al fresco mall of gaudy and noisy go-go bars that probably constitutes the single largest collection of sex workers on the planet.

sex
Kelly Chapman

Enough with the woman-loathing sex-confessionals

The first thing you learn as a young woman, without anyone telling you a word, is that men love sex. Men want to have sex with you and men want to have sex with every woman. They love sex so much they will do anything to get it. They will trick you into having sex with them. They will flatter. They will lie. They will do whatever they can to get you into bed. This is the foundational myth on which the fantasy of male vitality is built – the red-blooded American man, always on the verge of losing control. Now it may be true that our late-liberal order has neutered this impulse. Blunted it. We may be seeing a new generation of dysfunctional, BlueChew-popping eunuchs.

Wednesday

Toby Young

The rise of toxic femininity

From our UK edition

At the end of last year, the government announced a programme designed to tackle the radicalisation of young men in schools. Teachers will be trained in how to spot misogyny in the classroom and children deemed to be at fault sent on ‘toxic masculinity’ courses – an attempt to ‘re-educate’ white working-class boys that’s guaranteed to spawn 1,000 memes. It was billed as a key component of the government’s strategy to halve violence against women and girls by 2035. Don’t worry about the grooming gangs – the real predators are the knuckle-dragging teenagers, as per Adolescence, which was festooned with Golden Globes by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association last week.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The young women hypnotised by Polanski

From our UK edition

A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote for the Green party under its wonderful new leader, Zack Polanski. Bad as I tend to expect things to be, even I thought that surely things can’t be that bad. However I dutifully entered the terms ‘Polanski’ and ‘young women’ into Google, and promptly fell down a different rabbit hole. Defining my search terms a little more clearly, it turned out that my informant was correct. So badly deranged are the youngest cohort of female voters in this country that a third of them really do believe that they have found their saviour in a man who until recently promised that he had a technique to inflate women’s breasts through hypnotism but who also thinks that J.K. Rowling is a crank.

Wednesday

H.A. Scott Trask

The Last Westerner captures the American Southwest

 The epigraph to this novel is from Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, one of the French author’s Arthurian romances. It is fitting because The Last Westerner is a medieval romance, as well as an epic set in the American Southwest in the closing years of the 20th century. The dedication is to the author’s wife and to the late Edward Abbey, a personal friend. It is equally fitting because The Last Westerner is a western novel in setting and theme and will bring to mind other western novels such as Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992). Abbey’s book is subtitled, An Old Tale in a New Time. That could be the subtitle for The Last Westerner too, and as for pretty horses, Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s novel is full of them.

horseback last westerner

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Are America’s women heading for the exit?

Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave. That is four times higher than the 10 percent who wanted to quit the US in 2014. According to Gallup, which conducted the poll, nearly half the nation’s younger women have “lost faith in America’s institutions.” This disenchantment accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which enshrined the constitutional right to abortion. Younger American men are bearing up better. Only 19 percent share women’s distaste for the Donald, a 21 percent differential which is the largest recorded by Gallup since it began asking the question in 2007.

Women
Punctuation
Melanie McDonagh

Down with exclamation points!

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation. Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.

Wednesday

Michael Gove

The ‘wickedness’ of Labour’s gender war

From our UK edition

48 min listen

This week: After leaked EHRC guidance threw Labour’s position on biological sex into disarray, Michael and Maddie ask whether Bridget Phillipson is deliberately delaying clarity on the law – and why Wes Streeting appears to be retreating from his once ‘gender-critical’ stance. Is Labour quietly preparing to water down long-awaited guidance? And has the return of puberty-blocker trials pushed the culture war back to square one? Then: Shabana Mahmood unveils her first major moves as Home Secretary. But as the Labour left cries foul and legal challenges loom, Michael and Maddie assess whether her plans will really bring order to the asylum system – or whether Labour’s attachment to ‘process over principle’ will scupper the reforms before they bite.

Friday

Arabella Byrne

Long live the yummy mummy

From our UK edition

Yummy mummies everywhere, put your Veja trainers and frill-collar shirts away, because last week the Times issued a stinging broadside. Being labelled a ‘yummy mummy’ is apparently now so derogatory as to be an ‘almost cancellable offence’. The Yummy is dead, the headline declared, while my phone blew up like the fourth reactor at Chernobyl as Yummies far and wide forwarded me the article. ‘We are not dead!’ many fulminated, while others were more concise: ‘That’s just bollocks; I’ve never worn barrel jeans in my life.

Thursday

Henrietta Harding

The wild world of the ‘Ozempic safari’

From our UK edition

Safari log: 3.56 p.m. and the Land Rover is parked up on the savannah. Inside, we wear dark glasses and muted clothes. Minutes pass and we still can’t spot the animal we have come to see. We are told that she only comes out at certain times of day, that she is shy. No, we’re not actually in Africa; we’re in a prep school car park in the Home Counties, on what is known as an Ozempic safari. We have gathered to spot the ‘Mounjaro Mummies’ prowling around after the summer holidays. It’s wild, in all senses. It’s also socially and morally dubious. Word on the street is that the number of Mounjaro Mummies has swelled after the two-month break, their transformations taking place away from the daily scrutiny of the school run.

Monday

Tim Shipman

Introducing ‘Farage’s fillies’

From our UK edition

13 min listen

Another day, another Reform party press conference. Following political editor Tim Shipman’s cover piece on how Reform hopes to win over women, this morning’s event was led by the party’s top female politicians: MP Sarah Pochin, Greater Lincolnshire Mayor Dame Andrea Jenkyns, Westminster councillor Laila Cunningham, and Linden Kemkaran, the leader of Kent County Council. Nigel Farage was missing in action as Reform tried to make the case that they are not a one-man band or a ‘boys’ club’. Has Farage solved his women problem? Elsewhere, Kemi Badenoch is in Epping as she tries to wrestle the agenda away from Farage when it comes to asylum seekers and migration. But has she got anything different to say?

Thursday

Tim Shipman

Motherland: how Farage is winning over women

From our UK edition

On the campaign trail in the Midlands ahead of May’s local elections, a journalist asked Nigel Farage: ‘Do you have a woman problem?’ The twice-married, twice-separated father of four laughed and said: ‘God, yes. I’ve had 40 years of it.’ His response was characteristic of Reform UK’s leader – a determination not to take things too seriously and a tacit acknowledgement that every political cause he has espoused has been more popular with men than women. ‘Around me there’s always been a perception of a laddish culture,’ he says. ‘Ukip was the rugby club on tour.’ In last year’s general election, 58 per cent of Reformvoters were men. Since May, when Reform seized 700 seats and ten councils, that has begun to change.

Tuesday

Natasha Feroze

Does Starmer know what a woman is?

From our UK edition

12 min listen

Parliament is back after the Easter holiday and the Supreme Court ruling over what is a woman continues to dominate talk in Westminster. The Prime Minister has changed his tune on trans, declaring he does not think that trans women are women. This has caused some disquiet in the party, with a number of senior MPs breaking rank over the weekend. Was Starmer right to row in behind the ruling? Also on the podcast, as we edge closer to the local elections, they look increasingly important for the two main parties. Pollsters are forecasting a good result for smaller insurgent parties such as Reform and the Greens, with big losses for Labour and the Conservatives. It is not an overstatement to suggest that these could be the most important local elections in recent history.

Thursday

Hermione Eyre

The rediscovery of the art of Simone de Beauvoir’s sister

From our UK edition

An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt, to the 75-year-old biographer and friend of the de Beauvoir sisters, Claudine Monteil, as her recollections helped elucidate Hélène’s abstract paintings. The reclamation of a new ‘lost’ artist was under way. De Beauvoir’s cubist self-portrait is quite good – but ‘Simone in red jacket’ must never be seen It is possible, these days, for gallerists to do good work – self-defining as allies and activists – while making a good fortune.